I recently started using their dashboard which is great.
I got a call from one of their advisors. their main sales pitch was aggressive TLH and that they would create your own index of stocks instead of total stock market which is heavily weighted by the larger companies. They would lock in the gains in different sectors if they went up while the index would remain the same. they are going to send me their recommendations and then will schedule another call
Has anyone had any experience with them?
i am currently invested in only index funds.

The app is great, the investment product not so much. I listened to their pitch once but now let them go to voicemail. If you are looking for management then a robo, fidelity go, schwab int. Portfolio or vanguard pas.
You should know how bogleheads feel about stock picking after a very cursory review of the forum.

i joined about a year ago.
Ended up taking off my investment accounts as I was looking at it several times a day even though it updates only once a day (see obsession)
Now only my expenses are being pulled in, which is great, and I really enjoy their budgeting tool, everything is categorized automatically with easily reclassifications and differentiation between reimbursables and business items.
I've got some 0% credit card debit floating and Personal Capital reminds me that my net worth is negatice everything I log in, which is good motivation to get it paid off.
As far as their investment scheme, never entertained their calls or emails.

I find that Personal Capital is a better tool than Mint for investment tracking and use it for that. I use Mint for expenses and budgeting.

Their advising product is, like any financial advising product, not really something a Boglehead needs. I do appreciate that they are transparent about what they suggest so that it's easy to see you could do it yourself if it were worth doing. I got one call, and explained politely that I was not interested. No emails or calls since.

As long as your AA is appropriate for your risk tolerance and needs - that's all you need.

PC is nice to have for aggregating your financial picture, but you don't need to pay them the AUM to use it. They have an aggressive sales staff - which you have already discovered. Make sure you are prepared and ready to say "no thank you" on the next call. And on each subsequent follow up call. Plenty of firms would be happy to collect an AUM fee from investors, but you can absolutely do it all yourself.

Meanwhile, enjoy the dashboard and features of the app/website. It is quite nice.

"Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time." ~ Steven Wright

Personal Capital's advisory service isn't really intended for Bogleheads. It makes sense for any investor who currently works with a 'traditional' advisor (think Ed Jones, Schwab, Fidelity, Northwestern Mutual, Raymond James). Essentially, people that need help for whatever reason from an FA, should hire Personal Capital because they're willing to pay for help. If you can manage your assets well by yourself and are happy to log in rely on a forum like this to get the advice a dedicated FA would provide, then there really isn't a point to hiring them.

I recently started using their dashboard which is great.
I got a call from one of their advisors. their main sales pitch was aggressive TLH and that they would create your own index of stocks instead of total stock market which is heavily weighted by the larger companies. They would lock in the gains in different sectors if they went up while the index would remain the same. they are going to send me their recommendations and then will schedule another call
Has anyone had any experience with them?
i am currently invested in only index funds.

any input would be appreciated

Their performance numbers are no better than buying their benchmark etfs. The only reason they beat the index is because they assume you are paying a management fee.

One of the things I don't like about their new scenario organizer is that planning for college expenses was downgraded. I used to be able to account for future children in my planning, but now all birth dates must be prior to the current date. It has messed up my retirement analyzer because I can no longer adjust the cost for these future expenses without updating the information in the college planner section, at which point I have to admit that I'm trying to plan for unborn children and then the planner doesn't like that.

All-in-all it's a pretty neat website, and the service is free to I can't complain too much. It seems to work with my Vanguard account, which is signed up for 2FA, without any additional promptings.

"Knowledge and innocence are both excellent things, and they are both very funny. But it is right that knowledge should be the servant and innocence the master." - GK Chesterton

Does Personal Capital work if you have two factor authentication set up on your accounts (Vanguard and bank account)?

Definitely works with Vanguard. Hit or miss with some banks. Does not work with Treasury Direct. Sometimes works with my credit union HSA. Some banks give you a separate password for the tracking websites to access your accounts without giving them your full login credentials, which is cool.

They have fairly hefty management fees for a robo advisor last time I checked. I had strongly considered the Personal Capital / Betterment approach, which is what ultimately led to Bogleheads and my DIY approach. I'm thus far quite happy with the result (ask me again in 30 years ). I find their aggregator service very helpful for quick check-ins, although I manage my own spreadsheet with all the topline numbers I want to track on a monthly/quarterly basis. That way I'm not hostage to changing platforms, service issues, etc. But I do like their service and their visualizations. Their retirement planning tool is also useful, especially for running multiple permutations that I'd rather not have to do manually in Excel. But they could provide better documentation of what they're doing under the hood so you know whether you agree with their assumptions and methods.

As far as their portfolio goes, TLH is good, but I think it only goes so far. Think of it as a marginal boost, not turbocharging the portfolio. And you do eventually have to pay those taxes unless you can hold the fund until your demise, so while you might be able to take some tax arbitrage and trade on the time value of money, you ultimately will either pay those taxes sometime or never see the money yourself. I'm sure someone has published some good research on this.

From what you've described -- building their own stock portfolio that has fewer large companies than "the index" (presumably the S&P 500 or something) -- they're building a portfolio with a tilt toward small or value or small and value. If that's what you want to do, no reason you can't do it yourself right now. Just swap out some percentage of your Total Stock Market style fund for a Small Cap or Small Cap Value fund. Then keep going about life, TLH from time to time if that's your thing, and continue not paying their management fee.

Based on the suggestion here, I setup an account on personal capital. I really like their dashboard. I got a call as well suggesting the 20minute complimentary call with the advisor. I told them that I will not be signing up for their investment advice service and don't want to waste their time with the initial call.

I mainly went there to get a handle on my credit card and day to day expenses. I think I made the mistake of giving them too much information about myself. I have now deleted all the investment accounts.

I use the website and app. I did the video call pitch once. It was interesting to hear, and they are very transparent in sharing their equal sector weighting strategy with you, but the fee is quite high.

It is higher than robos because they see themselves as not being a robo service. And, true, you would have a real live advisor. But still, that advisor had almost no discretion and just carries out the algorithm.

I have nothing particularly bad to say about PC, but I don't think they're well-suited to Bogleheads. If you (or your SO/family) want the "security" of having an actual human financial planner, they are certainly less awful than most AUM shops. Their investment plan is fine, but I doubt it would beat a 3-fund portfolio over time, and certainly not by enough to justify paying the AUM fee forever.

I had my assets managed there for about 18 months, including a sizable taxable account. I had transferred to PC from Morgan Stanley, where I was getting absolutely fleeced: 1.5% AUM, plus high expense-ratio funds. So PC's 0.89% with no garbage funds seemed like a bargain in comparison. Of course, after a couple of months with PC I discovered Bogleheads, and I realized that even 0.89% was too expensive. I recently moved the bulk of my funds out of PC and into a low-cost brokerage, where I'll slowly rebalance away from the individual stocks and into broad market ETFs. It'll happen pretty slowly unless and until we have a pretty significant correction, however. With the rise in the market over the last 12 months, I have a lot of unrealized gains. The individual stock portion of the portfolio does a decent job of tracking the broader market since it's so many stocks (just under 100), so for now, I'm holding my existing positions while adding new money to VTI/VXUS/BND.

I'm thus far quite happy with the result (ask me again in 30 years ). I find their aggregator service very helpful for quick check-ins, although I manage my own spreadsheet with all the topline numbers I want to track on a monthly/quarterly basis. That way I'm not hostage to changing platforms, service issues, etc.

Agree, I run my financial planning life on Excel, with pretty sophisticated workbooks I've built for myself over many years. I use PC as a convenient way to rifle through my holdings in all of my accounts when I do my own quarterly asset allocation review. I punch in the latest values that PC has aggregated for me into my spreadsheet. This saves me probably an hour or two each quarter, which seems like a good value since the service is free. And the calls and emails from the advisors don't bother me too much. Just a drop in a proverbial bucket of general spam I get.

I've been reluctant to sign up for Personal Capital because I'm afraid of potential security issues. That concern may or may not be warranted but, considering how many people seem to love the features offered by PC I am surprised Vanguard (or Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, etc.) does not offer something similar.

Vanguard's Portfolio Watch is good to track asset allocation, risk exposure, fund type, expenses, etc. but, we can get the same from Morning Star. It seems like Vanguard could really separate themselves from the pack, in one additional way, if they offered a similar function to PC.

I assume Vanguard must already have an army of IT people at the ready just waiting for a new project to work on. Probably could knock this PC cloning project out in a day or two

Should the Bogleheads rise up and ask (demand) ...or am I just dreaming?

Well, look at what just appeared in my Schwab Account Summary! I fancy new summary page and the ability to link external accounts! Pretty snazzy, I must say the portfolio aggregation with analysis tools has kept me busy for the last hour when I should be preparing for Thanksgiving guests! While Personal Capital looks more visually appealing with more donut charts and colorful widgets, I'm finding the Schwab portfolio analysis much more useful.

I've been reluctant to sign up for Personal Capital because I'm afraid of potential security issues. That concern may or may not be warranted but, considering how many people seem to love the features offered by PC I am surprised Vanguard (or Fidelity, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, etc.) does not offer something similar.

Vanguard's Portfolio Watch is good to track asset allocation, risk exposure, fund type, expenses, etc. but, we can get the same from Morning Star. It seems like Vanguard could really separate themselves from the pack, in one additional way, if they offered a similar function to PC.

I assume Vanguard must already have an army of IT people at the ready just waiting for a new project to work on. Probably could knock this PC cloning project out in a day or two

Should the Bogleheads rise up and ask (demand) ...or am I just dreaming?

Fidelity does offer something similar. Fidelity GPS. If you click on analysis, it will give you option to manually add in external accounts and link them. I have been using this and PC for a couple of years to compare. To me, they are equivalent.

I have never used their software but I have read that Quicken appears to offer more value.

Quicken is far more powerful. Unfortunately like many others, I've given up on that product. It is unbelievably bloated, has an antiquated design, is filled with SPAMing ads for other Intuit products, full of bugs that never get fixed for years and years, etc.

I recreated what I needed from Quicken using a library of Excel workbooks of my own design. I know I'll never have to pay an upgrade fee to Intuit again, and my tools fit my needs perfectly and are super powerful!

Sure, I'll be paying MSFT for Office365 forever but I'm fine with that because for < $11/month my entire household uses Office, and we use the HECK out of it.

I used both for a couple years but dropped Personal Capital as I got tired of the phone calls. I find Mint to be satisfactory since I'm retired and easy enough to look on Vanguard for other things I need to see. Mint does struggle at times with keeping accounts logged in but I use it mostly for budget items and eventually the other stuff which i can get off Vanguard catches back up.

I use PC, largely the app. What's not to love? It's a free, real-time aggregation of my several investment institutions, several banks, and several lenders. They have a vested interest in maintaining adequate cryptography because they want to manage assets, so I have no concerns about giving them passwords.

Pardon me as I read these one hundred and fifty-seven SP vs LLC vs Scorp threads...

Ever since Experian got hacked I worry about apps like MINT. They want to know all your account numbers and balances for "tracking" purposes. Well what happens if they get hacked. Seems even the most secure web apps have some vulnerability to being hacked. I even hate to track my own stuff on my personal PC in a spreadsheet as everything goes to the CLOUD using Carbonite backup to recover files. Does anyone else think about the possibility of these apps like MINT or PC getting hacked and having all your accounts and everything exposed. It would be a huge hassle to have to move all your accounts to new accounts and new passwords and etc.

Does anyone else think about the possibility of these apps like MINT or PC getting hacked and having all your accounts and everything exposed. It would be a huge hassle to have to move all your accounts to new accounts and new passwords and etc.Maybe I am being paranoid but this is a concern for me.

The world of cryptography is way more advanced than you or I (unless you have a background in it) may ever know. I can guarantee that PC and Mint are both WAY more protected than your spreadsheet. Unfortunately, they're also more heavily targeted because they pool a lot of sensitive data and the reward to a hacker who breaks PC or Mint is greater than the reward to a hacker who breaks into your spreadsheet.

I should also point out that when any site storing passwords is compromised, they take measures (much like credit cards) to stop the hemorrhage and protect users from any damage. In addition, if you use a password manager (which I will guess you won't because of your concern about giving passwords to third parties), resetting large numbers of passwords is as simple as a click of a single button. I use Dashlane, and I reset every password, every year in about 15 seconds. Passoword managers creates complex and unreproducible passwords. I remember a single password, and my PW manager remembers all my high-quality passwords to all other entities. If you are already starting to worry about the PW manager being hacked, recall that they have the same high level of cryptography. I'd rather entrust my finances to two companies worth of crytography engineers than to my own spreadsheet.

Like seemingly everything else in life, it comes down to risk tolerance.

Pardon me as I read these one hundred and fifty-seven SP vs LLC vs Scorp threads...

Not to be argumentative but I do work in Information Technology. There is not an encryption method on the planet that with enough powerful computing power it cannot be broken. We have a team of people who sit all day and night in front of massive displays looking for breaches. We have a team of people in a separate building who try to break into our systems to find vulnerabilities.

The difference between something like MINT and my spreadsheet is my spreadsheet does not have account numbers and passwords on it. I may have a code for the account name like for instance say I have an account card at Capital One so I might have an entry something like 1pac and the amount. But that is it, no account number, no password.

If Experian can be hacked and they have everything in one neat tidy package, UBER, and so many other companies trust me, there is exposure everywhere. So you are correct in saying that it is your risk tolerance that you put all your eggs in one literal basket. My point is something like MINT has everything all in one neat tidy place. An individual account can be hacked but that is one account at a time. Not your entire financial structure.

Not to be argumentative but I do work in Information Technology. There is not an encryption method on the planet that with enough powerful computing power it cannot be broken. We have a team of people who sit all day and night in front of massive displays looking for breaches. We have a team of people in a separate building who try to break into our systems to find vulnerabilities.

You clearly know your stuff and I'm not in IT or any computer science field. I just enjoy math and read about public/private key or E2E and think I know something.

I guess I have the same attitude towards hackers as I do towards microbes. They're everywhere, and there is no way you can elude all of them. So let your immune system/engineers do their best, but expect a hack here or there, despite the best choices. It's the same attitude I have toward the market: I expect a correction despite the best choices. Maybe I'm just being a bit laissez-faire or just old-fashioned lazy by wanting PC to track my portfolio rather than do it myself.

And I appreciate your thoughts.

Pardon me as I read these one hundred and fifty-seven SP vs LLC vs Scorp threads...

Well, look at what just appeared in my Schwab Account Summary! I fancy new summary page and the ability to link external accounts! Pretty snazzy, I must say the portfolio aggregation with analysis tools has kept me busy for the last hour when I should be preparing for Thanksgiving guests! While Personal Capital looks more visually appealing with more donut charts and colorful widgets, I'm finding the Schwab portfolio analysis much more useful.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the external accounts are not included for any of their analysis tools. So, for getting an asset allocation view across accounts, PC seems to still win. Same for cash flow, and propably other factors. I like Schwab and wish they would incorproate PC, Mint, etc. tools into their site.

When the personal capital people call I just tell them I am not interested in talking to them or hearing their pitch. I tell them I only signed up for the tool and don't want to talk to them at all. The calls don't last long or happen that often.

Does anyone believe they are providing these sites for free out of the goodness of their hearts? They have to make money off of the users of the site one way or another. They either sell you something or mine the data for other purposes. Nothing is"FREE"!!

Looked at Personal Capital a while back. Question: If you give them your passwords and your Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity/Bank account is hacked due to a breach at PC, who is responsible in the eyes of those financial providers?

I seem to remember an out for Schwab in their disclaimers in this instance as well as one of my banks, probably the other brokerages as well. Not everyone has two-factor authentication possible for all accounts. Only a matter of when PC or Mint is hacked, not if...

Have instead been using FinancialEngines, which you must update manually, but they don't need account numbers and passwords. I don't need a budget tool.

Looked at Personal Capital a while back. Question: If you give them your passwords and your Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity/Bank account is hacked due to a breach at PC, who is responsible in the eyes of those financial providers?

The user. Most of these institutions have clauses in their online terms of service that state that a user should never give their password away and that the institution is not responsible for what may occur if a user does.

Pardon me as I read these one hundred and fifty-seven SP vs LLC vs Scorp threads...

Here is my experience with Personal Capital over the last 14 months. In short:

> On 2016-12-12, I removed my credit union from the Personal Capital system because failed attempts by Personal Capital/Yodlee caused me to be locked out of my credit union account. Yes, 14 months ago in 2016.

> On 2018-02-15, FOURTEEN MONTHS after I deleted the account from Personal Capital, Yodlee again attempted to logon to my credit union. My credit union logs showed the attempt came from a Yodlee IP address.

> On or about 2018-02-18, after nightmarish attempts to get through to Personal Capital or Yodlee personnel who gave a damn--without my request or permission--Personal Capital deleted my ability to logon to their system. The last communication from them was from James, Feb 16, 5:53 PM PST:

"Hello John,
We have double checked all our databases and did not find any trace of those accounts outside of logs showing the deletion of the accounts with xxxxx Credit Union and we are following up with our aggregation partner, Yodlee to obtain an explanation. "

That is it. I was hoping to get assurance that Yodlee has made sure my credentials and all my financial information was removed. It looks like that is not happening.

User beware. This whole event calls into question the privacy of all of your financial information--any user IDs and passwords you may have shared with Personal Capital may not be protected.

This is exactly why I do not trust ANY of these sites. Mint, and all the others can be hacked and all our accounts and everything are an open book for being hacked. Why would anyone think this is a good idea? It is totally beyond me.